Washington, United States — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Washington known for?

It sits on Puget Sound, where Boeing builds jetliners, software campuses turned the region into a technology hub, and coffee houses sent the Seattle style around the world. Behind the skyline rises Mount Rainier, a glacier-capped volcano crowning the Cascade Range. Its evergreen forests give the state its nickname, and their timber built the early port towns along the coast.

East of the mountains, the country turns dry. There orchards and vineyards along the Columbia River yield apples and wine, and the Palouse hills roll in wheat toward the Idaho line.

Where is Washington?

Washington sits in the far northwest of the contiguous United States, the corner where the mainland runs out at the Pacific. The ocean forms its whole western edge. To the north lies Canada, with British Columbia across the line; to the south the Columbia River marks most of the boundary with Oregon before it bends west to the sea.

Idaho closes off the eastern side. Between those edges the land is anything but uniform. The Cascade Range is the spine that splits it.

These mountains run north to south down the middle of the state, and they divide two different worlds. West of the crest, the Puget Sound lowland runs south from Canada, a trough of water and city caught between the Cascades and the Olympic Mountains. The Sound itself is a maze of inlets and islands reaching in from the Pacific Ocean, with the San Juan Islands scattered near the Canadian border.

East of the crest, the country dries out fast. The Columbia Plateau spreads in shrub-steppe and wheat, cut by the wide arc of the Columbia River and rising toward the Palouse hills and the Idaho line. Mount Rainier stands above it all, the highest point in the state and the tallest of the Cascade volcanoes.

What is Washington like?

Washington wears its weather and its water lightly, and much of its character comes from the rainy coast. Coffee is the everyday ritual here. The modern café culture spread from a single Pike Place Market storefront in Seattle before it reached the rest of the world.

That same city gave rock its grunge sound, the flannel-and-feedback music of bands out of Seattle and the mill town of Aberdeen. Aviation runs just as deep, since Boeing built the region's fortunes on the jetliner, and software and online retail later turned the Puget Sound area into one of the country's technology centres. Life leans outdoors.

Mountains, forest, and saltwater sit within an hour of most doorsteps, and the ferry is a normal way to commute. The first peoples of the coast, the Coast Salish and their neighbours, carved the cedar and fished the salmon runs long before the city rose, and Seattle itself carries the name of a Duwamish and Suquamish leader. East of the Cascades the culture shifts.

Wheat, apples, and vineyards set the rhythm there, and the wine of Walla Walla and the Yakima Valley has earned the dry interior its own name. English is the common language across both halves, with Spanish widely heard through the farm country.

What is the history of Washington?

People have lived along these shores and rivers for thousands of years, building cedar-plank towns and salmon economies long before any European sail appeared. Outsiders came late. British and Spanish ships charted the coast, George Vancouver mapped Puget Sound in 1792, and Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River.

The region was held jointly by Britain and the United States until an 1846 treaty fixed the northern boundary. Washington Territory took the first president's name in 1853. Statehood came on the eleventh of November 1889, when Washington joined the Union as its forty-second state.

What is the climate of Washington?

The Cascade Range makes two climates out of one state. West of the crest the air comes off the Pacific, mild and damp, with grey wet winters and a dry, bright stretch in late summer. The Olympic Peninsula catches the worst of it, and its western valleys hold some of the wettest ground anywhere in the contiguous states.

East of the mountains, the rain quits. The Columbia Plateau sits in a rain shadow, hot and dry in summer and cold under clear skies in winter, closer to a high desert than a coast.

How do you get to Washington?

Most journeys begin in the air over Washington. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is the region's main air hub, the busiest in the Pacific Northwest and a common crossing point to Asia across the Pacific. By land, Interstate 5 runs the length of the state from Oregon up to the Canadian border, and Interstate 90 climbs east over the Cascades toward Spokane and Idaho.

Trains follow the coast, cross the mountains. Ferries fan out across Puget Sound to the islands and north to British Columbia, so the water is part of the journey too.